3d printing of living plants has arrived

[Borgholio]

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/07/l ... -printers/

Project PrintGREEN is turning 3D printers into on-demand gardeners after designing a “green” 3D printer in 2013. The printer produces living prints, printing customized objects in a variety of sizes and forms. The project was created at the University of Maribor in Slovenia, conceived of by students Maja Petek, Tina Zidanšek, Urška Skaza, Danica Rženičnik and Simon Tržan, with help from their mentor Dušan Zidar. The project’s goal is to unite art, technology, and nature, creatively producing living designs with the help of technology.

The “ink” in the machine is a combination of soil, seeds, and water which can be designed to print in any shape or letter. After drying, the muddy mixture holds its form and begins to sprout grass from the organic material. PrintGREEN’s slogan is a twist on the old conservationist motto, “think before you print,” telling their audience to “print, because it is green.” You can follow the project’s progress on their Facebook page.

[Darmalus]

Title had me thinking someone had come up with a way to 3d print plant cells (likely into a cellulose backing of some kind) and actually have the organism survive, not just fancy turf.

[Borgholio]

That's what I thought too, but this is still pretty neat.

[biostem]

So it basically print the goop from the Chia pets however you want. Is there a reason this would be better than, say, simply using the 3D printer to create a lattice-like structure, and you just applying said chia-seed-goop? I assume the form would break down as the plants grow, in the example given...

[madd0ct0r]

Title had me thinking someone had come up with a way to 3d print plant cells (likely into a cellulose backing of some kind) and actually have the organism survive, not just fancy turf.

ther are people working on it, but I think the focus is on building organs, and less so plants.

[biostem]

Title had me thinking someone had come up with a way to 3d print plant cells (likely into a cellulose backing of some kind) and actually have the organism survive, not just fancy turf.

ther are people working on it, but I think the focus is on building organs, and less so plants.

Imagine if you could take a small sample of a person's various cardiac cells. You culture the different types in a lab, feed them into the specialized 3D printer's hoppers, then couple that with high resolution 3D medical imaging technology, and you have organs on demand. It's a pipe dream, but it would truly revolutionize medicine.

[cosmicalstorm]

As biotech becomes cheaper the world will become weird. I wonder how the anti-GMO crowd will deal with people writing their own plant genomes at home.

Printed organs will be a part of the rejuvenation-revolution. Stem cells and organ-printing are two of the most well-funded parts of the future rejuvenation toolkit. Currently most of the world is possessed by the idea that every human alive today will inevitably age to death. Once the first celebrity has Glucosepane removed with enzymes or something like that we are in for a big revolution.

Lets hope a nuclear war or another Carrington event does not come along and spoil all the future fun.

[Purple]

I seriously doubt we shall reach any form of immortality in our lifetime. And even if we do it's going to be something reserved for the uber rich whilst the rest of us wilt away and die.

[cosmicalstorm]

That's the boring ass Matt Damon version of anti-aging. I think these treatments are going to be dirt cheap.

Take Senolytica for instance. All needed is a single treatment that costs about $50-100. Mind you, there are people who have already tried this on anti-aging forums. I would too if I was over 50. It's a fairly risk free gambit, people eat Quercetin and Dasatinib day in and day out for years to combat cancer. All needed is a single dose for significant effect.

In old mice, cardiovascular function was improved within five days of a single dose of the drugs. A single dose of a combination of the drugs led to improved exercise capacity in animals weakened by radiation therapy used for cancer. The effect lasted for at least seven months following treatment with the drugs. Periodic drug administration of mice with accelerated aging extended the healthspan in the animals, delaying age-related symptoms, spine degeneration and osteoporosis.

http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/2015/ ... gcell.html

Lets say you use a couple of Senolytica combinations, an enzyme treatment to remove Glucosepane. Voíla, suddenly you increased your lifespan by 30 %.

This is not going to be for the rich.

One of the root causes of aging is the formation of advanced glycation end-products (AGEs), something that happens much faster in a diabetic metabolism, but which nonetheless happens to all of us and causes progressively greater harm as the years pass. AGEs gum together and disable vital protein machinery, and also hammer on cell receptors in ways that cause chronic inflammation and other ills.

Past work on ways to break down AGEs - AGE-breaker drugs - largely occurred prior to the present rapid pace of development in biotechnology, and was both laborious and ultimately of little use in people despite promising animal studies. It turned out that the most important types of AGE in long-lived humans are not the same as in short-lived rodents, and thus drugs that help rats do little for people. However, one single form of human AGE - glucosepane - does make up the vast, overwhelming majority of AGEs in tissues such as skin. So it is a very viable, narrow target now that the research community knows enough to identify it as the primary target.

A safe way to remove glucosepane is needed in order to largely eliminate this contribution to degenerative aging. Sadly, as for much of the foundations of future rejuvenation therapies, little work and funding is directed to this end. This is thus one of the areas in which the SENS Research Foundation hopes to step in and spur greater interest and progress. Here are some notes on the current research programs funded by the Foundation to this end:

https://www.fightaging.org/archives/201 ... ograms.php

[blowfish]

I would wait for other studies to confirm the effect before jumping on the hype train like an I Fucking Love Science facebook commenter.

[cosmicalstorm]

I have no need to remove my senescent cells yet for a couple of decades so I can afford to wait. However people older than me don't have that luxury. Once the rejuvenation-revolution gets started in the 2020's a lot of people will have aged to death.
Me personally, I have thrown the dice with mitochondrially locked SOD-mimetics (C60 and MitoQ) and it's gonna be interesting to see where that takes me. I'm no fool though, maybe the result will be awful but so far it feels good.

[Simon_Jester]

As biotech becomes cheaper the world will become weird. I wonder how the anti-GMO crowd will deal with people writing their own plant genomes at home.

Printed organs will be a part of the rejuvenation-revolution. Stem cells and organ-printing are two of the most well-funded parts of the future rejuvenation toolkit. Currently most of the world is possessed by the idea that every human alive today will inevitably age to death. Once the first celebrity has Glucosepane removed with enzymes or something like that we are in for a big revolution.

It's not going to be simple, kiddo. There is no one chemical, or combination of chemicals, that are the 'cause for aging.' There is no one mechanism that causes it.

The reason why, despite having made vast progress in combating almost every disease and organ malfunction known to man except the ones we call "aging," we still haven't really figured out how to treat aging itself. Aging isn't some kind of specific condition that can be treated with a single magic pill, it's a very large number of issues that mostly boil down to this:

A machine that was designed to run for fifty to seventy years cannot easily be made to run for ninety to a hundred years. This becomes all the more true as the number of parts in the machine increase- because while you may be able to protect ONE part of your body by careful maintenance, and good genetics may protect ONE part of your body, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to protect everything. And when it comes to aging, the chain that holds together our health in old age is only as strong as its weakest link.

That's the boring ass Matt Damon version of anti-aging. I think these treatments are going to be dirt cheap.

Take Senolytica for instance. All needed is a single treatment that costs about $50-100. Mind you, there are people who have already tried this on anti-aging forums. I would too if I was over 50. It's a fairly risk free gambit, people eat Quercetin and Dasatinib day in and day out for years to combat cancer. All needed is a single dose for significant effect.

Are you familiar with the phrase "snake oil salesman?"

People have been claiming that you could halt the advance of aging with their special patent medicine for "only" the price of a day or two's wages for the average laborer since... well, frankly, we have documentation of that sort of thing since the days of Rome if not earlier. Hint: they were lying. It's a very efficient way to make money- bottle small quantities of an alleged 'medicine,' claim that it will stop you from growing old and dying, and countless people desperate to delay death will show up and start paying for it. Sure, no one of them spends thousands of dollars.

But unlike most real experimental medicines, your patent 'medicine' is cheap to manufacture and, like most scammers, you're really only trying to make a few tens of thousands of dollars before the police investigate. So it doesn't matter that you're not charging very much.

And of course you market these products to a niche market which is desperate and gullible and easily fooled into spending fifty or a hundred dollars on useless 'medicines.' In other words, the same anti-aging forums frequented by the people who've tried the last dozen such 'medicines.'

The thing is, for the cheap 'treatment' you pay for, the reward you get is... nothing at all. And you spend on such useless products again, and again, because the mindset doesn't change as time goes on. It will always be seen as "such a good deal" to spend fifty dollars for a 'medicine' that doesn't actually do anything, because it never occurs to the buyer to think critically about the real probability that the 'medicine' performs as advertised.

Me personally, I have thrown the dice with mitochondrially locked SOD-mimetics (C60 and MitoQ) and it's gonna be interesting to see where that takes me. I'm no fool though, maybe the result will be awful but so far it feels good.

Yes, we're all familiar with your passive-aggressive "only time will tell whether my falling for this snake oil salesman was a good idea" thing, since you put up like three threads in SLAM about it.

[K. A. Pital]

Why don't you try the most proven thing, cosmicalstorm? I mean, exercise + calorie restriction? Most people who want to live longer do it. And it's like, cheaper than eating something with no proven record of anything. If you live long enough, you can see a real cyberization and biotech revolution somewhere in the 2030-2040, and subsequently prolong your life even more - incrementally, step by step. But exercise and sensible diet are the best way to get there.

That's the most boring version of transhumanism, I know. But that's also the one most likely to actually work.

[Simon_Jester]

Calorie restriction would require day to day inconvenience, whereas taking a teaspoon full of fake medicine that doesn't do anything is easy...

[His Divine Shadow]

I seriously doubt we shall reach any form of immortality in our lifetime. And even if we do it's going to be something reserved for the uber rich whilst the rest of us wilt away and die.

Unless we take them with us before we die.

[Zeropoint]

Unless we take them with us before we die.

There we go.

"I'm going to live as long as the human race exists . . . one way or another!"

[Purple]

I envy you optimists. The way I see it the strong can newer be defeated by the weak. For every time we try nothing changes. We just replace one group of overlords with another and the weak remain weak.